The Official HostGator Company Blog!

It looks like GeoCities, the Free Web Hosting service owned by Yahoo!, is officially ending service to website owners today. I’m sure many of you have used their service at one point or another, so it’s kind of sad to see them go down with all of the web sites they hosted. My first web site was on GeoCities, complete with a looping, low-quality instrumental midi file, and animated graphics. Many other free web hosting services like GeoCities have risen and fallen over the years because the free hosting business model just doesn’t seem sustainable.

It’s amazing how many web sites with no business model or profitability sunk during the .com internet bubble. Internet businesses, like any other company, aren’t immune from the age old philosophy of “you need to make money to stay in business”. Now there are a few exceptions to this rule. It’s still possible to come up with a great idea for a web site and receive funding from a venture capital firm (read: Twitter), but for the everyday web business owner, they understand the need to make a profit.

Many GeoCities refugees have migrated over to HostGator, and we want to welcome you all with open arms. We can assure you that HostGator won’t have the same fate as GeoCities because well, we’re a profitable company.

If you have a site with GeoCities and need a new home, post a comment and we’ll try to throw you some free months worth of Hosting at HostGator.

41 Responses to GeoCities Hosting Calls it Quits

Yea, agree with you Chad. I also had my very first website on Geocities. I used their web-based sitebuilder to build it. It was an amazing experience for me to have a corner for myself in the Web world.

I have become a full flagged businessman now in the web field. No more free host are useful for me. But, its kind of sad feel seeing Geocities going down.

I appreciate Hostgator supporting various social causes by providing free hosting to NGOs etc. Keep it up.

That’s awesome to hear that you’re offering to help people migrate over from GeoCities to HostGator. There’s a team of volunteers who were attempting to get an entire back up of GeoCities (http://www.seohosting.com/blog/search-engine-news/yahoo-to-shut-down-geocities/) I am not sure if they were completely successful with doing this or not. But I have to agree, it’s crazy to lose such a historical piece of the Internet.

By hosting your own server you have complete control of everything. Companies I worked with chose to do this so they knew what was going on with the server at all times – they didn’t have to worry about a fire, explosion, theft, etc. I’ve worked with a hosting company that had an explosion in their server room – and our server was down for over a week. Usually, something like this is the reason a business will decide to host their own server.

I strongly recommend against doing this if you’re a small business. If you set up your hosted server correctly, you can have back-ups and redundancy plans without having to invest in purchasing the email server, software, IT personnel, etc.

I have experienced with many hosting companies.I think there is a great competition between hosting companies.Companies are investing a lot in hosting business because it is very profitable business.I think for getting best quality service hosting company you should spend lot of time online and try to read more and more reviews.

hahah, blogger, you described my experience exactly. Started with geocities in 7th grade. Complete with the looping midi and animations!
That started my thirst for control over how I wanted my websites to be displayed….
I never realized how much I owed geocities till this blog. RIP.

Hey,
I had not read this newsletter earlier… I was browsing the newsletter archive and found this… If hostgator is really giving out free months of hosting, I am in! Please don’t tell me I am late. Although I have one more payment recently. I hope I do get a response. Besides, I have some great ideas for a web application if someone is willing to sponsor (heartily) me/my ideas.

All please note with China, Russia and previous Russian colonies, India , Singapore and all the other IT savvy countries out there , there is no free lunch in the IT area anymore, we need to move to the Bio-medical and Clean energy Industry/ revolution now one step ahead all the time go for it America.